Incubating your eggs can prove to be useful in any urban homestead. If you’re looking at the Nurture Right 360 incubator, here’s an honest review.
We have always known we wanted to keep a rooster on our urban homestead. They’re an extra security measure and we don’t have to spend money on fertilized eggs.
We have let hens go broody with success (and not so much success) before and loved having chicks to shower with love and attention.
However, a broody hen is never a sure thing. As our flock has grown, it can be hard to tell who is broody and who just loves to hang out in the coop!
Enter in – the Harris Farms Nurture Right 360 Incubator.
Pin this post for later!
What is the Harris Farms Nurture Right 360 Incubator?
*This is an unsponsored review, meaning I wasn’t compensated in any way to publish this blog post.
This incubator is an automatic egg turner that gives you complete visibility of your eggs.
The incubator comes in a few different pieces.
The first is the water reservoir, which has an external water pot. This is so you don’t have to constantly remove the lid and impact your humidity levels.
There are two water pots – one for use up until day 19 of incubation. The second, water pot B, has a plug that you don’t fill until three days before hatching. This will help spike your humidity.
On top of the water reservoir sits a plastic tray. On top of that is the automatic egg-turning tray with holes large enough for your eggs.
Finally is the clear incubator lid. The screens on top have an easy-to-read humidity control display and an egg candler.
Pros to the Nurture Right 360 Incubator
There are quite a few pros to the Nurture Right 360 Incubator. And many of them drew us to this particular incubator.
The first was the claim to optimal hatch rates.
We dug through quite a few online reviews and forums and found very many success stories.
We also loved that the incubator can hatch duck eggs and pheasant eggs. If we ever wanted to expand our homestead, we could! This incubator can work with a variety of egg sizes.
The Nurture Right 360 Incubator has a 22-egg capacity for chicken eggs. It can hold between 22-24 pheasant eggs and 12-18 duck eggs.
We also loved that this incubator has a clear lid. This gave us a 360-degree viewing window of everything that was going on in our incubator.
Finally, we loved the “set it and forget it” simplicity of this incubator. The automatic egg turner took the guess work out of the equation for us.
Every day, we made sure that water pot A was half full, per the operating manual.
Three days prior to our estimated hatch day, we removed the egg turner, filled water pot B, and continued to keep both water pots filled.
It truly was that simple.
Cons to the Nurture Right 360 Incubator
This was our first try at hatching chicks.
And luckily, we didn’t have any issues with the Nurture Right 360 Incubator. Our issues, unfortunately, came from our flock.
Our First Time Incubating Chickens
We were so excited for our first hatch! The Nurture Right 360 was easy to use and we knew our brooder setup was successful. All we had to do was wait!
This data is from March and April 2024. Check back for future updates! For more information on hatching your chicks for the first time, check out this blog post.
First Hatch
We supplied 22 chicken eggs for our first hatch. We candled those eggs between 7 and 10 days and an estimated 15 eggs were fertilized.
Our chicks hatched on days 21 and 22 of incubation. Only 8 eggs hatched.
What we think happened is related to user error. We didn’t realize how important sustained humidity was in those final days of incubation. And we opened the incubator after every chick hatched.
When we referenced online forums, we realized this may not have been our issue. Because after day 22, the rest of the eggs we thought were fertilized showed no signs of pips.
Second Hatch
We became conservative with our second hatch and wanted to test a few theories.
So for the second round of incubation, we supplied 15 eggs.
We did not candle those eggs until after the chicks hatched. And when the chicks did hatch, we only opened the incubator twice.
Out of the 15 eggs, 6 were fertilized and 5 hatched.
This confirmed our chief concern. Our rooster is courting the majority of our flock, but for whatever reason, the majority of our flock isn’t fertile.
Pin this post for later!
Would We Recommend the Nurture Right 360 Incubator?
As a backyard homesteader just starting, I would recommend the Nurture Right 360 Incubator.
The manual that came with the incubator was simple and helped us better understand the technical parts of the incubation process. The automatic turner took the guesswork out of the process.
And the digital screen even kept track of our incubation period!
Is the Nurture Right 360 Incubator Worth the Extra Cost?
Compared to other incubators, this is an investment.
And while we have never used different incubators, we knew we wanted to pay for things like ease of use, visibility, and precise humidity.
The Nurture Right 360 was able to give us all of those things.
Not to mention, this incubator lived on my kitchen counter. It’s quiet, easy to use, easy to maintain, and perfect for just getting started with hatching eggs.
Are You New to Keeping Chickens?
I am a proud crazy chicken lady. And I will gladly encourage you to become one!
If you are in the research stage of growing your flock, I have several posts you can start with.
If you’ve heard about the different types of chicken feed but don’t know where to start, check out this blog post. I also talk about free-range chickens and organic chickens. Because they require different types of feed!
Our chickens have a coop with doors so our chickens can free-range. But does a coop need windows? Read this blog post to find out.
I have a whole list of gear you may need to get your backyard homestead started on my Resources Page. These are tried and true products we use on our backyard homestead!
For more backyard homesteading inspiration, follow me on Pinterest and sign up for my newsletter!
Happy Homesteading!
Pin this post for later!
Leave a Reply